Identifying older patients with frailty from routinely collected hospital data

Dr Thomas Gilbert is a consultant geriatrician (Hospices Civils de Lyon, FRANCE), with interests in Health Services Research. He worked with Dr Jenny Neuburger and colleagues from the Nuffield Trust in London on the development of the Hospital Frailty Risk Score whilst he was a clinical research fellow under the mentorship of Prof. Simon Conroy in Leicester (Department of Health Sciences).  He will be speaking at the Urgent care for frail older people event on 25 May at Horizon in Leeds. 

Advances in health care have helped people in developed countries live longer than ever before. This is good news for all of us, but it also presents a challenge to our health systems and a need to rethink the way that we provide healthcare. Out of nearly 20 million people admitted to an NHS hospital in the UK in 2015, a quarter were aged 75 years or older, and this proportion is set to increase.

For some older people, hospitalisation is associated with increased harms over and above their presenting clinical condition. Recognising that age alone is insufficient to identify and respond to such vulnerability, the term ‘frailty’ is increasingly being employed to highlight patients exposed to an increased risk of poor outcomes and likely to require higher resource use.

Beyond text and images: Tackling loneliness with technology

Dr Eiman Kanjo is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. Eiman has written some of the earliest papers in the research area of mobile sensing and she currently carries out work in the areas of technologies and data science for health & Wellbeing, Smart cities, Environmental Monitoring and its impact of health, and wellbeing monitoring. She tweets @eimankanjo She will be speaking at the Loneliness in Older People and its Impact on Health event on 13 June at Wellcome Collection in London.

Loneliness is a sad and frustrating event in anyone’s life, however its impact is more damaging for older people. Many older adults have lost so much of their independence they are left with memories of the life they once knew. Things that were once so important to them are taken away, such as the ability to drive, go to church, read a book, or even connecting with their loved ones.

Among the ways to combat loneliness, technology is starting to play a major role in helping to bridge the gap of interactions that older adults need.

In general, older adults do not necessarily dislike one form of technology or another, however, they are sometimes distrustful about the need for technology or about their ability to utilise it.

The Lonely brain

Dr Samuel Barnes Ph.D is a Lecturer at Imperial College London in the Division of Brain Sciences and was recently awarded a UK Dementia Research Institute Fellowship. The goal of his research is to understand the role of neural circuit plasticity in aging and neurodegeneration. His group uses a combination of in vivo voltage and calcium imaging, bioelectronics and electrophysiology to investigate the neural plasticity factors that make the aged brain susceptible to neurodegeneration and ultimately dementia. You can read more about his work here.  He will be speaking at the Loneliness in Older People and its Impact on Health event on 13 June at Wellcome Collection in London.

Daydreaming can be one of life’s great pleasures. Losing yourself in a thought or spending time quietly reflecting on the day’s events is an important part of modern life. But what if solitary thought was the only option? For many older people periods of loneliness are all too frequent. Such periods of social isolation can involve little to no contact with people for prolonged periods of time. What do these prolonged stretches of loneliness do to the brain?

To answer this question, we must consider how the brain processes the sensory and social world. The substrate of thought is the electrical activity that flows between neurons in the brain. These tiny nerve cells are connected to each other forming complex circuits that store and process sensory experience.

Uncontroversial truths; Discussing urgent care for older people

Stuart Parker is Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Newcastle University and a consultant physician at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust where he is helping to develop an acute inpatient service for frail older people. Here he discusses the Urgent care for frail older people – Hospital Wide Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment Meeting on 25 May in Leeds.

Frailty is now widely recognised as a key component of declining health and function in old age.  Older people with urgent care needs are particularly likely to experience frailty.  New acute illness can trigger the onset of frailty in an older person who, in whom the limits of their functional capacity may be urgently revealed. Older people are increasingly the main users of urgent care services. Accordingly, urgent care services for older people need to be able to recognise, evaluate and manage frailty.

Is this your first time?

Dawne Garrett is Professional Lead for Older People and Dementia at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Eleanor Sherwen is Professional Lead for Palliative and End of Life Care, and also works at the RCN. They will be delivering a workshop at Living and Dying Well with Frailty Meeting on 6 March in London. Please note this meeting has now sold out and there will be no on site registration. To join the waiting list please email registrations@bgs.org.uk

Approaching end of life care discussions with the patient for the first time…

Dawne and I have been asked to deliver a 60 minute workshop on this key and sometimes challenging area of practice. The importance of choice and the delivery of holistic person centred care is repeatedly highlighted in the literature, both from researchers and policy makers.  Yet how can we even begin to deliver person centred care when there is at times a reluctance to open up and initiate these essential conversations? Let alone when communicating with someone who has limited sight, poor hearing and cognitive impairment. The evidence says that professionals can feel more comfortable approaching conversations in relation to sex, rather than having conversions with patients and those that are important to them focused on death and dying.